There once was a boy who pilfered money from his mother’s purse. When his mother found out he’d been the culprit (and not the house maid) she slapped him at once (but never apologized to the maid for suspecting her). And when he told his mother that he’d been stealing money to buy comic books, she slapped him again, only harder this time, with a loud and narratively fitting “Pow!”, her violent response an example of the kind of attachment to values that typifies older generations. The boy was too immature to grasp the parallel between his mother’s backhand-forehand slapping and the kind of ass-kicking his comic book superheros were more than inclined to serve to the morally crooked, which included stealers of all kinds, and the lesson that such lessons were hidden in the most ungratifying circumstances blow-dried right over his head. It was this kind of lack of perspicacity that the mother had had in mind when she refused to entertain the boy’s repeated demands for comic books, reasoning that the boy was too young and foolish to resolve any kind of morally spectral literature for himself; this denial is why he ended up stealing the money in the first place. What the mother was unaware of, however, was that while beating the fear of God into her son, she beat his inner child out of him: the boy would grow up to be colder than the chilled beer he would come to rely on for everything between casual company to maximally requited Love. The mother also didn’t realize that the morality she thought she was instilling in the boy by beating him was actually being effortlessly cancelled out by the boy’s not so immature observation that the mother was being totally hypocritical in her spiel about righteousness by failing to apologize to the maid for having mistakenly suspected her of stealing and, worse, making similar groundless allegations in the future while cognizant of the fact that the maid could not simply quit because this job paid the medical bills which resulted from her daily drunk husband beating her for her money for some daily drinking. What makes the mother’s hypocrisy especially pernicious is that she used the repeated allegations as a device to instil fear and self-doubt in the maid, managing to keep her self-esteem and thus wages low. All this the boy knew, but would not help the maid, even when he was old enough to vote, because moral reasoning in the house was pretty much self-serving and fear-driven, he reasoned that because this was her only source of income he shouldn’t interfere and possibly make her situation worse, and besides, the poor possess the secret to happiness or else why the hell are they all not committing suicide by the millions? And so the boy was complicit in the grotesque unfairness and thus had more reason to pass out daily in various street corners in his later realization filled years.
There is a point in this story about Morals, but the Moral of the story is to not point it out.